FBI issues statistics on missing children

33 percent were black in 2005; 58 percent were girls

By THOMAS HARGROVE, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, March 9, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The FBI, for the first time, has complied with a 1990 act of Congress by issuing a public accounting of 662,196 lost, runaway and kidnapped children reported by police to state and federal authorities last year.

Fifty-eight percent of the missing children reported to federal authorities in 2005 were girls, according to the FBI report, and 33 percent were black -- a disproportionately high percentage that surprised advocates for missing children.

The FBI in the last two weeks released the records at the request of Scripps Howard News Service. The records show that missing-children cases -- at least those actually reported to the FBI -- have been declining during the past 10 years, down from a peak of 791,687 cases in 1995.

But the number of cases bumped up 7 percent in 2005 after several police departments began for the first time to immediately report missing children.

These departments admitted they'd been violating federal law by delaying their reports to the FBI -- often in hopes the children will return home on their own -- or by entirely ignoring cases of suspected runaways. Missing-children advocates warn that police must intervene quickly -- usually within hours -- to prevent homicides in stranger-abduction cases.

Finkelhor called the release of the FBI files "a real coup." He said he is contacting missing-children advocates nationwide to rally support for more detailed data in future FBI reports.

"This might be a very auspicious moment to make some recommendations about what we think ought to be regularly available," Finkelhor said.

The FBI steadfastly maintained for many years that computer records at the National Crime Information Center are confidential, and rarely made missing-children data public. That policy violated provisions of the National Child Search Assistance Act of 1990, which requires annual statistical summaries to assure Congress that local police are obeying its mandate that missing-children cases be "immediately" reported to state and federal authorities.

The FBI still refuses Scripps Howard's request for geographic information showing where children are reported missing.

Other kinds of data the bureau has recently released provide never-before-seen details about missing-children cases.

Most curious is the discovery that a third of missing-children records for 2005 were of black children, nearly three times blacks' share of the general population. Previous estimates based on Finkelhor's studies and records at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children suggested that black children account for about a fifth of the nation's missing children.

The FBI data show that two-thirds of all missing-children reports were for 15-, 16- or 17-year-old youths.

Only 2,223 infants were reported last year.

The files also show that local police classified 16,897 cases -- or slightly less than 3 percent -- as "endangered," meaning authorities feared the children had been kidnapped or were in the company of a dangerous adult.